The race for the newly created 46th Senate District tightened a bit on Friday, and by Monday all the ballots that the courts so far have allowed to be admitted will have been counted.

After that, it's a sure bet either the Democrats or Republicans, or both parties, will head to the midlevel appeals court to try to be authorized to count some of the hundreds of absentee and provisional ballots that have been excluded on technical grounds in this neck-and-neck race.

Following Friday's ballot counting, Republican George Amedore of Rotterdam saw his lead over Democrat Cecilia Tkaczyk of Duanesburg shrink from 111 to 47.

Absentee and provisional ballots that had initially been excluded because of protests by one side or the other, but which Acting Supreme Court Justice Guy Tomlinson of Montgomery County said should be counted, were tallied for Ulster, Montgomery, Schenectady and Albany counties.

Similar ballots from Greene County will be counted Monday.

What remains are hundreds of ballots that have been set aside.

And while both Democrats and Republicans can go to the Appellate Division of state Supreme Court to ask that they be counted, it appeared that the Democrats may be the first to do so.

That's because the bulk of the laid-aside ballots were in Ulster County, where Tkaczyk is believed to have an edge thanks to heavy Democratic enrollment.

While Republicans weren't saying for sure that they would go to court after Monday, Democratic spokesman Gary Ginsburg in a prepared statement on behalf of Tkaczyk said, "This counting is far from over."

"There are still hundreds of outstanding objections that have to be ruled on by the appellate court. These include votes cast by election inspectors that voted early at the instruction of both Republican and Democratic elections commissioners and hundreds of affidavit ballots that were thrown out because of minor errors," he added.

Ginsburg was referring to absentee ballots cast by poll watchers who, on the apparently mistaken advice of election commissioners, turned their ballots in ahead of time.

There were other objections to some of the ballots. For example, there were objections to admitting an absentee ballot from Saugerties in which the voter wrote "New York, New York" as the address.